My First Few Hours Playing Simcity 2013

It started a few days ago, when I stumbled upon an article about the latest release of the Simcity game. This reminded me the old Simcity game which I played during my much much younger days. It was an interesting, open ended game. The player decided how the game would turn out. I think I should revisit an old game with new gameplay.
I purchased the PC Download version. As it required 12Gbytes of harddisk place, as expected, it took quite a while to download the game.

Initially, I thought there was the only long wait. When I started the game, it performed an update with the server. It took another awfully long time to process “large file”. After that, I had to restart the game to start playing. Over the course of the few days, it had to be updated a few times. Perhaps, it is because it is still a fairly new game. There is much to be updated.
The first ten to twenty minutes was spent going through a sort of “tutorial” on the basics of the game. Although “basics”, it was sufficient to get me get started. Along the way, there was pop up guides to provide hints and “to-do” to proceed with the game.

At the start of the game, I had to build roads, basic infrastructures (ie, water supply, electric power, etc), zoning the areas, etc. The fun part was to slowly, from nothing, seeing a town being form, from hourly deficit to profitable, the expanding towards becoming a city.

Later, I was guided to put public services (ie police station, schools, etc) to increase the land value, so as to attract wealthier residents.

At a certain point of the time, I was prompted that, I need more residents to provide workers for the factories. I kept expanding the residential zone and yet there was very few occupants in the new areas. It took me a 2nd hour into the game, before I was “guided” that, to increase the density of the residential area, I need to upgrade the road. I think it was one of the fun parts of the game, to discover new tricks.

Before I knew it, I was prompted to start another city in a neighboring area.

I found that Simcity is an interesting game. It is opened ended, and I believe I will spend hours playing this game. And I am still learning how to play this game.